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I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Robert Smithson

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Robert Smithson
Age: 35 †
Born: 1938
Born: January 2
Died: 1973
Died: July 20
Art Theorist
Artist
Conceptual Artist
Draftsperson
Drawer
Geologist
Land Artist
Painter
Photographer
Sculptor
Visual Artist
Passaic
New Jersey
Robert I. Smithson
Effects
Representation
Takes
Account
Artist
Apart
Art
Accounts
Effect
Elements
Direct
Exist

More quotes by Robert Smithson

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Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.
Robert Smithson
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Museums are tombs, and it looks like everything is turning into a museum.
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The memory of what is not may be better than the amnesia of what is.
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Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.
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An emotion is suggested and demolished in one glance by certain words.
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For many artists the universe is expanding for some it is contracting.
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Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void.
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A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.
Robert Smithson
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Nature is never finished.
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Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
Robert Smithson
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The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.
Robert Smithson
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The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
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Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson
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A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
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Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal.
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Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.
Robert Smithson
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Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.
Robert Smithson
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Language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody's head
Robert Smithson
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Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.
Robert Smithson
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Mistakes and dead-ends often mean more to these artists than any proven problem
Robert Smithson